Psych - Social cognitions

The way we think

The psychological processes that people engage in to make sense of social information

• Intuitive system
• Rational system

• Fast
• Automatic
• Parallel processing

• Slow
• Conscious
• Serial processing

• Unfiltered - Interpreting raw data
• Can be unrepresentative
• Can be inaccurate

Misperception of a group norm because the group is acting in a way that is contrary to personal beliefs in order to fit in with one another

• Comes from others
• Efforts are not always made to avoid error

• In service of entertainment (including bad news bias)
• Ideological distortions

Intuitive mental operations that provide efficient answers to common judgement problems

Relying on examples that come to mind easily

• How easy it feels to process information
• How familiar you are with it

Failure to recognize that the sum of probabilities A and B must be equal to, or greater than A and B

The extent to which something fits into a category to infer information about it

Numeric estimates are anchored to whatever comparison point we encounter

• Availability
• Representativeness
• Anchoring

Framing information to be seen as favourable or unfavourable

• Primacy effect
• Recency effect

Psychologically distant actions and events are thought about in abstract terms

• Spin-framing
• Order effects
• Temporal framing

When previously presented information activates a concept, making it more accessible